Reform or die

Neither Labour nor Tories grasp the need to ditch universalism to defend the nation

Nigel Farage, after Reform’s triumphant results in last week’s municipal elections and winning a hitherto solid Labour parliamentary seat

This is an extended version of my column in this morning’s Times UK (£)

Reform’s political earthquake has left both Labour and the Tories staring into the abyss. Nigel Farage has seized that most precious of political assets, momentum.

Some key Labour people understand the reason but the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, refuses to follow the logic. The Tories, however, don’t seem to get it at all. And that is the essence of the crisis gripping conservatism and fuelling the rise of populism across the west.

The remarks made by Reform’s chairman, Zia Yusuf, after his party’s game-changing triumph in last week’s local elections, got straight to the point. Young people, he said, needed to be re-moralised, given a sense of belonging, taught to love their country rather than, as at present, to hate it.

While TikTok was teaching western children gender dysphoria, he told the Sunday Times, it was teaching Chinese children to become scientists. Illegal immigration was a “national emergency” that was fraying the nation’s “social contract”. He asked:

How many young people know who Isambard Kingdom Brunel is? Look at the character assassination that has occurred on the legacy of Sir Winston Churchill. The fact that they have to cover up his statue because they don’t want to provoke protesters. I mean that’s the sort of utterly indefensible so-called leadership that we’ve had and young people feel that in their bones.

If you’ll forgive a touch of self-promotion, Yusuf’s remarks read like a distillation of my own writing since the late 1980s, which the political and cultural elites regarded as as irrelevant at best and toxic at worst.